Body as Danger: Gender, Race and Body in Toni Morrison's Sula

This paper aims at tackling the question as to why Sula as a social nonconformist and sexual dissident ends up as an avatar of evil, a powerless victim of witch-hunt and eventually a scapegoat for the decline and misfortunes of her community. To facilitate this critical task, this paper shall first apply Michel Foucault's genealogy of "the body as the bearer of pleasure and desire" as laid out in Abnormal to illustrate that Christian folks in Sula's community interpret Sula's nonconformity as evil and treat her as a danger to their social order. Thus, this paper argues that the black folks' os...